Chapter 36: 36 Backtories 3

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36: Backtories 3 36: Backtories 3 Eryndor Eryndor knew exactly what he was doing.

That was what set him apart from the other rebels.

Astaroth acted out of anger and grief.

Iskra acted out of loss and revenge.

Eryndor acted out of choice.

Deliberate.

Considered.

Repeatedly reexamined and confirmed.

He was born with a mind that functioned differently from those around him.

Not more intelligent in the ordinary sense.

Differently structured.

He saw patterns in things before things were complete.

He saw connections between events that seemed disconnected.

He saw where things were going before they got there.

It was a gift.

It was also something very much like a curse.

Because seeing where things were going meant seeing one’s mistakes ahead of time.

And choosing them anyway because they seemed necessary in the moment.

And then having to live with the knowledge that you’d seen them coming.

Zaroth had found him young.

He was an apprentice in a minor order.

A place that held all the power Eryndor needed to develop.

But Zaroth had something more.

Zaroth had the library of millennia.

The forbidden techniques.

The rituals no regular order would ever teach.

Eryndor had accepted.

Not without doubt.

The doubts had been there from the beginning.

But he had put them aside.

Because what Zaroth offered was real.

And what Eryndor wanted to learn required exactly what Zaroth offered.

He spent years learning.

Growing.

Becoming more powerful than he had ever imagined he could become.

The doubts remained.

But the doubts remained in the background, silent, like something waiting for the right moment.

The right moment came when Eryndor saw the laboratories.

He didn’t look for them.

He found them.

In that specific way you find things you didn’t want to know.

Through a series of coincidences that, looking back, no longer seemed like coincidences.

What he saw in the laboratories wasn’t a surprise in the sense that he had no clues.

The clues had been there.

He had chosen not to look at them.

What he saw was the final consequence of a series of choices he had made in the silence of convenience.

Eryndor stood still before what the laboratories contained for a time he couldn’t measure.

Then he turned.

He left.

And in that precise moment, that part of him that had put aside doubts for years stopped waiting.

It exploded.

Not like Astaroth’s anger.

Not like Iskra’s pain.

With the cold clarity of someone who has finally seen something for long enough that he can’t stop seeing it.

Eryndor hadn’t looked for the rebels.

He had found them.

The way you find the things you’re meant to.

Not by looking for them.

By becoming the kind of person who finds them.

Malina Malina had grown up on the streets.

Not as a metaphor.

As a physical reality.

The dusty, crowded streets of the demon realm’s borderlands had been her home in the most literal sense.

She’d never known a place with four walls and a roof that was hers.

She’d never slept in the same place for more than a few weeks at a time.

She’d never had anything she could say, “This belongs to me and not someone else.” Her family was made up of refugees and wanderers.

Not a stable group with defined relationships.

A shifting network of people who found each other for a while and then lost each other.

Always on the move because standing still was risky.

Always in the middle because not belonging anywhere was the only protection available.

Malina had learned to move the way things that don’t want to be seen move.

Silently.

With the ability to occupy space without seeming to occupy it.

To be present without leaving a trace that you were there.

Then came the night of the Imperial raid.

Malina was twelve years old.

Zaroth’s legions were doing what they periodically did in the borderlands.

Clearing.

That was the term they used.

Like clearing debris from a room.

Like clearing weeds from a field.

In a single day, everything Malina had known had been swept away.

Not just people.

Not just places.

But that fragile, shifting network that was her only form of belonging.

Young Malina found herself alone.

It wasn’t entirely new.

But the difference between the only one you choose and the only one that remains is the difference between walking and falling.

What set her apart from the other survivors in that situation was this.

Malina didn’t sit around waiting for someone to find her.

She started moving.

As naturally as she had always started moving in the streets.

As if the network was still there.

As if the next place was already there waiting for her.

She soon discovered that she had an ability she didn’t know she had.

Or rather.

She didn’t know it was an ability, rather than simply the way it worked.

she could hide in people’s blind spots.

Not with magic.

With something more subtle and practical.

With the art of being precisely in the blind spot of anyone watching.

Of occupying the space that glances skip.

Of moving in a rhythm that people’s attention can’t follow.

Her combat prowess was the same thing in a different form.

Not the frontal combat of Astaroth.

Not the elemental power of Iskra.

Something closer to precise elimination.

She had joined the rebels not because she had a political vision.

Not because she believed in abstract causes.

She had joined because she had finally found something to fight for that wasn’t just survival.

The end of oppression.

Slogan: “Don’t come.” Like the one concrete thing that would prevent another twelve-year-old girl from finding herself alone on another night of Imperial raids.

Now she was here.

In a castle she didn’t know.

With three people who had learned to trust the way you learn to trust the people who save your life so often.

And with a target.

Precise.

Immovable.

Zaroth.